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Great reporting by Associated Press

The first sentence: "The U.S. agency that monitors gun sales has suffered a setback in its effort to increase scrutiny of the bulk sale of high-powered assault rifles in border state gun shops that are a chief source of weapons smuggling into Mexico."

But they must be very tiny rifles: ""It's not against the law, and it's not going to be against the law, for you to buy 40, 50, even 100 of these weapons and put them in the bumper of your car and drive them around or even down to the border," said ATF spokesman Scot Thomasson."

And "individuals on several occasions bought dozens of AK-47s as well as .50-caliber high-powered rifles capable of shooting down airplanes, even after rifles they purchased earlier had been seized."

The two themes consist of describing a scheme whereby straw purchasers bought from an FFL, and explaining why requiring FFLs to report multiple sales of rifles would deal with that, but it acknowledges "Howard [the FFL] cooperated with law enforcement during the investigation, calling agents when individuals purchased dozens of AK-47s at a time, according to a federal official familiar with the case, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing."

This is the news media propaganda shilling for the upcoming proposed firearms ban by the President. You've got to whip up some amount of public support for the government to further restrict our rights. The spin has been in for a few of weeks. That's why Bloomberg did his "sting." It was the start of the media "awareness" campaign.

Of course, like you said, why do you need a law to do this when the dealer already reported it without the law and nothing happened?

This honestly looks like a three pronged approach. One, drum up support for an increased budget for the BATFE because they are woefully underfunded and cannot possibly have the manpower to deal with what is happening. Two, make this an awful drug war related state department issue that has to do with international relations. And three, make this about evil guns, to which Mexico needs protection from our loose laws.

Of course, none of this has to do with the fact that corruption is rampant in the Mexican Federal and State governments. Nor that drug dealers don't need semi-auto weapons from the US because they can get fully automatic rifles from other countries, or just bribe / steal them from their own country's military and paramilitary organizations.